SECOND SIGHTING

The apostrophe is handled differently by Google, Yahoo! & Microsoft when showing your PPC ads. It’s not something thats really mentioned in any of the help documentation but i’ve had problems with it, so hopefully this quick tip will be of help to some people. Lets say you want to add a keyphrase including a word that should have an apostrophe e.g. the word can’t. Here is how it will be handled by:

• Google & Microsoft - you must add the apostrophe to show for searches with an apostrophe, and leave it out to show for searches without one.
• Yahoo! - you must add the apostrophe otherwise your ad will not show at all. It will then show for searches with or without an apostrophe.

One of Yahoo’s search partners just destroyed another of my good PPC keywords. And i’m in the UK so I can’t even use the new domain blocking feature to solve the problem. Take a look at the Google Analytics screenshot below and you’ll see how a particular site sent me 87 visits in 5 days. Those 87 visits cost me £135~ ($284) with a bounce rate of 88% and resulted in 0 conversions. This particular keyword normally gets 1 or 2 clicks a month from Yahoo! and converts great for me. Then for good measure they threw in a few hits from a Yahoo! mail server in the US complimentary of… my own bank account. My campaign is targeted to the UK.

How to Join the Yahoo! Publisher Network

If you look at the site in question you’ll see how crap it is - just two lists of sponsored links. Is that all it takes to be a Yahoo! search partner? Maybe I should go build a site in 5 minutes and make myself some easy money.

I Want a Refund

I’ve contacted their customer support about this as I want a refund. There’s no way those clicks were from people searching for the keyword im bidding on or even anything close to it.

**UPDATE**

Yahoo! have kindly given me a refund for these clicks.

Yahoo! Search Marketing treats ‘blue widgets’ and ‘www blue widgets’ (for example) as exactly the same keyword. So if you’ve previously deleted ‘blue widgets’ due to poor ROI, then ‘www blue widgets’ will show for exactly the same searches. If only i’d found that out for free instead of £80.